02/11/1992 | Voices from the Drina

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This autumn is not only hungry and bloody for us. It’s freezing. The temperature frequently drops to -10 degrees centigrade (we have a thermometer on the facade of the house).

Someone has just told me that a group of starved Bosniaks were ambushed by Serb forces near the village of Podravanje. Everyone was killed. I daren’t imagine that my Dad may be among them. My chest aches. I haven’t left the front of the house all day, waiting to see him return.

🧵 Srebrenica is reaching the edge of its endurance. What was yesterday considered the limits of our endurance are pushed back every day.

We wake up miserable, in cold rooms with window-panes made out of plastic bags in windows covered by split logs protecting us against shell shrapnel.

We wake up exhausted and lice-ridden, without the desire and most often without even the strength to move, without families, alone and abandoned, humiliated, our past violated and our future slaughtered, our present defeated and defeating.

People in besieged Srebrenica are dying like thieves, carrying sacks of wheat on their thin backs. There’s something so demeaning in such a death: first they’re made into the worst kind of thieves, those that steal from farms, and then they’re killed. (1/2)

Death caused by a shell is quick, painless: the body is torn to pieces in an instant, skin ripped, bones broken. But those killed while on food-finding missions lie on forest paths for hours, bleeding, writhing, before they gasp their life away. (2/2)